Iceland attempting to ban Internet porn

Iceland could become the first Western democracy to block all internet porn under radical new proposals.

Fears about the damaging effects on children have led the government to work on legal measures to try and stop the flood of graphic sexual material reaching the island’s shores.

Interior Minister Ögmundur Jónasson has set up working parties to find the best ways to stem the tide of online images and videos being accessed by young people through computers, games consoles and smartphones.

A law forbidding the printing and distribution of porn has long been in place in the Nordic nation – but it has yet to be updated to cover the internet.

Two years ago, the Icelandic Parliament – led by female prime minister Jóhanna Sigurđardóttir - successfully banned all strip clubs on the grounds that they violated the civil rights of the women who worked there and were harmful to society.

This argument - that porn violates the rights of both women who appear in it and children who are exposed to it - is the cornerstone of the new proposals under discussion

2. Utterly Pointless

Methods under consideration include blocking porn IP addresses and making it illegal to use Icelandic credit cards to access x-rated sites.

Blocking IPs doesn't "stop porn," it stops access to certain IP addresses. Besides direct websites which sell the stuff (and do have specific IPs), porn files can also be downloaded through mainsteam file-sharing programs like bittorrent or large download repositories like RapidShare.

If there's massive, widespread demand for something, and especially when that something costs next to nothing to distribute, someone will distributeit. Hell, people generate amateur porn for free.

But surely if we can send a man to the moon, we must be able to tackle porn on the internet.

LOL. How about "If humans can go to the moon if they want to, then they will surely figure out ways to satisfy their demand for porn."